Is College Worth the Money?

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Right around this time every year, new graduates leave their
ivory towers for the "real world."

Most graduates have dreams of making their mark, but also hear
horror stories of unemployed
millennials moving in with Mom or using their master's degree
as a barista in a coffee shop. In today's changing economy, is
higher education really worth it?

From more money to delayed innovation, here are some of the pros
and cons of higher education.

Jumping on opportunities

College dropouts founded Facebook, Apple and Microsoft for a
reason. In technology, there is frequently a right time for an
idea to take off, and waiting four years to complete a college
education can mean missing out on those opportunities, said Mike
Gibson, the vice president for grants at the Thiel Foundation,
which provides $100,000 grants to budding entrepreneurs in order
to skip college and pursue their dreams. [ Creative
Genius: The World's Greatest Minds ]

Younger people are also more likely to be free of commitments, so
they can pull all-nighters and work longer hours than those
raising a family, Gibson said.

College may also be slowing down innovation, at least in the
sciences, Gibson said.

In a 2008 working paper, Northwestern University management
professor Benjamin Jones found that the age at which scientists
patent their first inventions has
gone up since the turn of the last century, from 23 to 32. That
huge jump is likely because more and more people are stuck in
college and graduate school when they would have had their
"eureka!" moment in the past. And people haven't simply shifted
their productivity to later in life — they are reducing their
overall life contribution, the study suggests.

Safety school

Of course, most people who go to college don't want to make the
next Facebook or reinvent the wheel; they want to do something
interesting and take home a decent wage in the process. And
there's no doubt the surest path toward steady income is to earn
a four-year degree, research suggests.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2009, a high-school
graduate earned a median of $30,627 a year, whereas
college graduates earned higher income, a median of $56,665.
And a 2010 study from Georgetown University's Center on Education
and the Workforce found that 60 percent of all jobs in the
country required higher education.

More jobs

Jobs that require just a high-school degree are disappearing, but
those requiring post-secondary education are increasing. The
Georgetown study predicted that by 2018, 22 million new jobs
would be created that require
college degrees, but at least 3 million fewer people would
earn college diplomas or bachelor degrees. All in all, degree
holders will have many more opportunities than those who drop
out.

Crushing debt

On the negative side, all of that education has a price tag.
Going to college often means taking on tens of thousands of
dollars of debt.

Sticker shock has some questioning whether higher education can
be acquired online at a fraction of the usual price. Massive
online course providers such as Coursera and Udacity now offer
hundreds of classes that can be taken for free while students
lounge at home in sweatpants. Some believe these classes will
replace many of the requirements in traditional two-year and
four-year colleges. In the Pew study, roughly 60 percent believed
that online coursework would change higher education by 2020.

"There was a strong sense that, at a minimum, blended coursework
— some combination of offline and online coursework — was going
to be the reality for many students," said Lee Rainie, director
of the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life
Project, which conducted the survey.

No regrets

Still, very few people who have earned a four-year degree regret
it, Pew's research suggests.

"By and large, people who have gone to college think it was a
valuable experience," Rainie said.